Books are born for many reasons. This one emerged as a result of many years of research and activism, which for me has always focused on environmentalism, Native sovereignty, and their intersection. If what the preeminent Indian law scholar Felix Cohen said was true, that Indians are the United States’ miner’s canary that signals the poison gas of the political atmosphere, to extend the metaphor, then in the larger world dominated by the fossil fuel industry all humans have become the miner’s canary. On a planet with a rapidly changing climate and undergoing what many scientists believe is the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, the future of humanity is looking about as bright as it did for American Indians in 1953 when Cohen wrote those words railing against federal Indian policy (known as termination, which was every bit as menacing as it sounded). From an American Indian perspective, we’re all on the reservation now.

书籍的诞生有许多原因。这一点是多年的研究和行动主义的结果，对我来说，它一直集中在环境保护主义、本土主权及其交叉点上。如果印度杰出的法学学者费利克斯·科恩所说的是真的，那么印度人就是美国矿工的金丝雀，它象征着政治气氛的毒气，延伸了这个比喻，那么在以化石燃料工业为主导的大世界里，所有人类都成了矿工的金丝雀。在气候变化迅速、经历了许多科学家认为是地球第六次大规模灭绝的星球上，人类的未来看起来和1953年美国印第安人一样光明，科恩写下这些话，抨击联邦印度政策（称为终止），这听起来有点威胁人）。从美国印第安人的角度来看，我们现在都在预订。